Modulation of scale-free properties of brain activity in MEG

The analysis of scale-free (i.e., 1/f power spectrum) brain activity has emerged in the last decade since it has been shown that low frequency fluctuations interact with oscillatory activity in electrophysiology, noticeably when exogenous factors (stimuli, task) are delivered to the human brain. However, there are some major difficulties in measuring scale-free activity in neuroimaging data: they are noisy, possibly nonstationary ... Here, we make use of multifractal analysis to better understand the biological meaning of scale-free activity recorded with Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. On a cohort of 20 subjects, we demonstrate the presence of self-similarity on all sensors during rest and visually evoked activity. Also, we report significant multifractality on the norm of gradiometers. Finally, on the latter signals we show how self-similarity and multifractality are modulated between ongoing and evoked activity.